Drag queen fights prejudice and ignorance

Thursday

Jan 24, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 24, 2013 at 10:16 AM

As a gay teenager in Modesto in the 1980s, "dressed to the nines," Sondra St. James was walking downtown when a carload of drag queens spotted him. They were out of costume, and forced St. James into the car, warning, "Girl, you are going to get yourself killed."

Lori Gilbert

As a gay teenager in Modesto in the 1980s, "dressed to the nines," Sondra St. James was walking downtown when a carload of drag queens spotted him. They were out of costume, and forced St. James into the car, warning, "Girl, you are going to get yourself killed."

They took St. James to their drag show, and his life would never be the same.

The abuse at school - more from faculty and staff than from students - being taunted and teased and called Boy Tim because he dressed liked Boy George, would continue, but the opportunity to parade on stage as a drag queen enabled him to escape, if only for a spell.

"It kind of saved me," St. James said. "At that point, I was a very angry teenager and I basically hung out with people and walked the streets all the time. If you looked at me wrong, I'd beat the hell out of you. When I started getting into this and focused in on this, it gave me a reason."

St. James finally was accepted and those older drag queens, her guardian angels, began shaping the adult that was to come.

"They're all gone now," St. James lamented. "We buried the last one (on Sunday)."

The work they did, reaching out and supporting those living alternative lifestyles, is their legacy, and it's been passed on to St. James, who proudly carries the banner. The 43-year-old entertainer and Stockton resident will appear at The Pride Center at 6 p.m. Friday. She'll participate in a question-and-answer session with Pride Center director Nicholas Hatten, then share some of the stand-up routine she's performed in Reno, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and other stops on the West Coast.

"Drag queens fall into the transgender umbrella, but there are differences within the two groups," said Hatten, whose organization supports the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community. "Transgenders want to live their lives and have people accept them. They want to be able to be who they are within their own skin, in the community. Drag performers are larger than life. It's about the art, the theatrics. They want attention."

Hatten admits his own knowledge of the drag community first came from a RuPaul show. He's since learned that it was drag queens, mourning the death of Judy Garland, who were involved in the Stonewall Riots in New York, referenced in Barack Obama's second inaugural address on Monday.

"They wanted to be in their space, mourning (Garland), because she was such an icon," Hatten explained. "The police raided, and they said, 'No, not right now. No more. You're not denying us this right to mourn,' and they fought back."

The riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village in the summer of 1969, are a defining moment in the fight for gay rights.

"What I'm going to do is tell about the past," St. James said of the appearance in the town she has called home for 11 years. "It's surprising to me how many people do not know their gay history. It's just as important as black history and Hispanic history, because we have our forefathers who really fought for us."

Her own life has been, if not a fight, then a struggle, a roller coaster as she calls it.

As a 13-year-old, St. James came out as gay and identifies herself now as female.

Her mother, who had her at 54, cautioned, "Choose your road wisely. I think the one you're choosing is going to be a rough one."

Although her mother accepted the lifestyle and the friends who came with it, attending their shows and cooking huge dinners for them, St. James' eight siblings, with their Southern roots, did not. The teasing she got at school was worse at home.

"Mentally what I did to compensate was to tell myself there's always somebody worse off," St. James said. "If it wasn't for the sheer fact I was (gay), it would be something else they found wrong. It's human nature to point at differences in each other. Where I'm grateful for growing up the way I did is I had to grow up. You have a choice. You pick yourself up and you keep going or you sit down and act like a victim. If you do, you'll be a victim the rest of your life."

St. James, like a lot of comics, turned the pain into a comic act, albeit one in full drag.

More than that, she became a drag queen held in high esteem by colleagues. She was elected at 21 as empress of the Owl Empire of Stanislaus County, one of the branches of the International Court System, a community service group that began in San Francisco and originally raised money for AIDS research and treatment and advocated for human rights.

"I started a huge toy drive and had food drives," St. James said. "When most kids were going out partying, I was doing something for the community."

The drag queens who'd pulled her off the street taught her well. They made her compassionate, which helped her nurse friends with AIDS and eventually care for her beloved dying mother, Nellie Rae Sharitt, who passed away eight years ago. They also taught her two of life's biggest lessons, which she now passes on to up-and-coming performers: tell the truth and have no regrets.

They seem simple enough rules to live by, but for St. James they're quite profound. Choosing the life of a drag queen is being true to one's self, but once the decision is made, there can be no regrets.